Journal of Writing & Environment


It’s just like me to bring a book outside

Where I know a pair of baby raccoons

Are dozing in the elbows of tree limbs.

 

A book of poems—so I won’t regret

Losing a plot when I look across

The creek where the raccoons wait for nighttime.

 

It’s just like me to suppose they are waiting

For nighttime and not for me to go back

Inside. But I am being very still now.

 

And quiet. And I have no gun. Unlike

The neighbor whose midnight furies

Have us all up our trees and trembling.

 

That’s big-time like me—making innocent

Baby raccoons of us all, everyone

But the shotgun man who, like the raccoons,

 

Is waiting for me to go back inside.